One of the exciting things about the Internet is that anyone with a PC and a modem can publish whatever content they can create. In a sense, the Internet is the multimedia equivalent of the photocopier. It allows material to be duplicated at low cost, no matter the size of the audience.
The Internet also allows information to be distributed worldwide at basically zero marginal cost to the publisher. Opportunities are remarkable, and many companies are laying plans to create content for the Internet.
It was obvious to the early pioneers of the web that they had created a revolutionary network for content distribution. Anyone could publish anything, anyone could discover what was being published, and it was going to change how the world communicated.
However, while these pioneers were generally right about the direction things were headed, the way it actually played out was different from what most people predicted.
They were largely too focused on how organizations would use this breakthrough to propel the internet forward. But the more impactful shift ended up being how individuals used the internet.
By breaking down all the friction around creating and sharing information, the companies that had traditionally controlled information flows would be outcompeted by individuals using an entirely new form of communication made possible by dropping the cost of distribution to ~0.
Social media is what ended up being the real new frontier of content distribution on the internet. Everyone became a publisher and, in the process, everything we knew about information sourcing/broadcasting was reinvented.
I think there's a lesson we can learn from this history that can be applied to crypto adoption. And, if we get it right, it could be the breakthrough that gets the average person to grasp crypto's full potential.
At its core, the internet is a protocol for sharing information.
The first use cases for this information protocol embraced the tech without fully exploring it. Much of what was built looked like traditional information services but reskinned to be internet native.
We built internet organizations. Online newspapers, news directories, centralized blogs, niche-specific forums. If you wanted information about that one thing you cared about, you went to that one website that was supposed to specialize in that topic.
Then, in the mid-2000s, in the aftermath of the initial internet growth bubble popping, a new idea emerged.
It was built around a form of information that had emerged organically through the petri dish of online culture: the post.
Posts had always been around, but they had generally played second fiddle to the main stage of content on the internet: the page.
Then Facebook remixed and repackaged the concept by introducing the News Feed in 2006. It was a seemingly innocuous tweak. Instead of making people browse to a page to see someone's new activity, it presented the activity itself as its own distinct, interactive item.
Here's early Facebook executive Dan Rose explaining how radical the idea was at the time:
The logic was sound. Reduce friction to discovering social activity as much as possible, and it would lead to more interactions with that social activity. This would lead to a greater chance for that social activity to go viral, increasing overall user time on the platform.
Despite an initial, extremely vocal backlash, the real numbers made it clear that the product was an obvious success.
At the same time Facebook was working on News Feed, another social media company was exploring new delivery mechanisms for content. Twitter.
The idea had come out of @jack's time working at a New York City–based company called Dispatch Management Services Corporation (DMSC), which managed dispatch centers for couriers.
He was fascinated by the communication activity they coordinated.
There was an essence of communication there...An abstraction. You have all these entities roaming about, and they’re all reporting what they’re doing in real time over a variety of different devices... it’s all flowing into this one system that a dispatcher can view in real time on a map. That’s what’s going on in the city! I thought that abstraction was so cool that I wanted that same thing for my friends.
These early products from Facebook and Twitter were rough around the edges and didn't contain all the social features we know and love today. Twitter wouldn't let you officially reply to a post until 2007. Facebook didn't show real-time posts until 2009, and it took Twitter until the same year to introduce the repost. Still, the early days of feed design had clearly introduced something special.
By making the delivery of ideas and activity as bite-sized as possible, the act of consumption became the distribution mechanism itself. People could like a post, comment on a post, share a post. All leading to more visibility. The same mechanism that was reducing the friction to discover content was reducing the friction for other people to boost and distribute that content themselves.
It was a perfect flywheel for real-time information. And it was something that never would've been possible without the internet.
A feed of user-generated posts is an alien concept pre-2000; it wouldn't have made sense as a way to scale mass communication before the digital age. But once we had instant, global, cheap distribution, it clicked.
~20 years later, this new way of publishing and surfacing content has changed global politics and culture. They're even making a scary movie about how powerful it is.
We can debate all we want about whether social feeds are inherently good or bad, what design considerations make them that way, etc. But there's no arguing that they were the single most impactful invention when it came to converting the general public from consumers of the internet to publishers on the internet.
So it's worth asking, what will the social feed moment look like for crypto?
The Internet was a new way to transmit data. Bitcoin’s a new way to transmit money.
It was obvious to the early crypto pioneers that they had produced a revolutionary network for transferring value. Anyone could send money to anyone else, at any time, and it was going to change how the world did business.
But as the industry closes in on almost two decades of existence, many are underwhelmed by what's been accomplished. A general sampling of the sentiment looks like this.
kalshi, tempo, open standard...
web 2.5 has completely won.
joinopenstandard.com/blog/introduci…
this is not the future of finance
The story is cut and dried. The Wild West days are over, the idealists lost, the banks won, and crypto will now move on to its future of being boring backend rails that make TradFi slightly more efficient.
We're not going to change the world.
Nonetheless, I (and at least a few others) remain optimistic that the best is yet to come. Two decades seems like a long time in tech, but it's not. Revolutionary tech has often proven to take even longer to show what it truly enables.
Marc launched the first breakthrough web browser, Netscape, in 1994. It then took 12 years for the internet to discover its most consequential consumer breakthrough in the form of feed-based social media.
It's now been 12 years since Marc said Bitcoin was having its 1994 moment. If the pattern follows, our consumer breakthrough is around the corner. We just need to figure out what it looks like.
So, considering the social media example we started with, let's review what the early iterations of crypto tech have focused on.
The first applications of crypto's value protocol have embraced the obvious use cases for the tech. Much of what has been built looks like traditional financial services reskinned to be crypto native.
Apps to send and receive money. Apps to speculate on money. Apps to lend and borrow money.
And these have been remarkably successful. Bitcoin alone has processed over $100T in volume, and that milestone happened four years ago. Ethereum processed over $1T in volume last year. We have created a laboratory for digital money that is one of the most interesting economic experiments in history.
Why, with this success, are we complaining?
Because, despite all this, we're still viewed as a joke. Many people around the world hold crypto as a means of securing their wealth. Roughly ~10% of the world's population owns crypto. But the active use cases struggle for adoption.
Our onchain financial primitives have yet to reach the average person beyond speculative hype cycles. And these days we're even failing at that use case.
and idk if it ever will be again
Meanwhile, where we have tried earnestly to innovate in a positive-sum manner, we've largely failed.
The most obvious example? DAOs.
DAOs were the first instinct for moving crypto beyond the early value exchange days. When Ethereum was launched, it wasn't with visions of decentralized finance. The early idealists were focused on using crypto in a productive manner to get things done in ways that had never before been possible.
The original drive to build Ethereum was heavily inspired by decentralized autonomous organizations: systems of code and rules that lived on decentralized networks that could manage resources and direct activity, more efficiently and more robustly than traditional governments and corporations could.
It was a noble goal and one which attracted an early wave of Ethereum believers. But, unfortunately, it ended in disaster with the DAO hack being one of the most consequential moments of early crypto history.
The community regrouped, reassessed, and rebuilt. The mission was too important to give up on.
Ethereum then found its early PMF in the speculative boom of onchain finance with ICOs, DeFi, and NFTs. Coordination in a rudimentary sense, but still coordination in the sense of spontaneously finding prices for decentralized assets.
Meanwhile, hardy individuals who still believed in the vision for non-financial human coordination continued experimenting.
Bounties Network and Gitcoin bounties worked on task-specific coordination. DAOs were formed in hopes of governing some of the biggest projects in the space like AAVE, ENS, and Arbitrum. And we even tried to buy the Constitution.
These projects showcased the passion that individuals had for making crypto productive. It was obvious to them that the value protocol would enable governance breakthroughs.
In practice, though, the road wasn't as easy as they expected. Bounties Network and Gitcoin bounties are no longer active. AAVE, ENS, and Arbitrum have all experienced governance crises to start the year. And we were outbid for the Constitution and failed to pivot to another mission.
Belief in DAOs is easily at its lowest point in history.
Not due to lack of need. Traditional organisations and capital systems are severely broken and unsustainable.
These movements failed because their very nature was reactionary - a rebellion against the current system. Same issues
predictably, the loudest advocates of DAOs quietly vanished after extracting millions from them
the good news; we can drop the BS theatrics & build real companies now
Very few for-profit companies will ever have long term success with a thousand (unqualified) cooks in the kitchen
If your token is mainly used for governance, 99% chance it’s going to 0
Why, despite the honest time and energy spent by people across the industry, did we fail to revolutionize coordination?
These DAOs were not bootstrapped operations on the margins of the industry. They had treasuries in the hundreds of millions, grants to focus on discovering new primitives, and thousands of humans focused on making them work. But it didn't matter.
The reason for this failure is best summed up by a response to one of the posts above.
Crypto is very good at regulatory arbitrage, improving systems bottlenecked by middlemen
Capital formation and payments have been bottlenecked by regulation; business strategy has not
So ICOs and stablecoins are 10x better, DAOs are not
Not due to lack of need. Traditional organisations and capital systems are severely broken and unsustainable.
These movements failed because their very nature was reactionary - a rebellion against the current system. Same issues
The flaw of the strategy was hidden in the name of the tool we first adopted. Decentralized autonomous organizations.
Our product path was similar to the logic behind early attempts at monopolizing internet content via online newspapers and news portals. We took a product built for the old world (large human organizations) and tried to remake it with our new tech.
The results were minor efficiency gains here and there, but nothing revolutionary. Organizations had been refined by the free market for hundreds of years pre-internet, just like publishers. And they were built to solve distribution problems that literally no longer exist due to the new tech.
Let's revisit an idea from the beginning of this essay: By breaking down all the friction around creating and sharing information, the companies that had traditionally controlled information flows would be outcompeted by individuals using an entirely new form of communication made possible by dropping the cost of distribution to ~0.
The internet-native unit of coordination isn't the organization, in the same way the internet-native unit of information wasn't the webpage.
Stripping away all the friction for individuals to permissionlessly post, consume, and share information discovered an atomic unit (the post). This atomic unit then allowed us to get the most out of the internet's information protocol.
What is the atomic unit of coordination that will allow us to get the most out of the value protocol?
In a world without constraints, most people take their time on projects, assume fewer risks, spend money wastefully, and try to reach their goals in comfortable and traditional ways—which, of course, leads nowhere new. But this is another reason why incentive prizes are such effective change agents: by their very nature, they are nothing more than a focusing mechanism and a list of constraints.
Bounties are one of history's most under-appreciated coordination mechanisms. They've given us modern food preservation, marine navigation, proof of the power of steam engines, and more.
They're effective because they focus on outcomes. Whereas an organization is as much focused on self-preservation as they are objectives, a bounty doesn't care how you achieve a goal. It just cares that you actually achieve it.
Bounties are the ideal atomic unit of coordination for the internet age. They are the means by which we can price exactly how much a specific outcome means to us and distribute that information instantly.
The most useful way to express an idea on the internet is a post.
The most useful way to create action through the internet is a bounty.
We inherently recognize this usefulness. This is why they were one of the first experiments in crypto alongside DAOs. It's also why we've seen a renaissance of bounties in the 21st century with XPrize, bug bounties from tech companies, and scientific breakthrough prizes. Mr. Beast has built his media empire on prize/bounty content. And the biggest companies on Earth see the value.
Bounties don't have to be large to be successful either. Fiverr, TaskRabbit, Cameo, and other web2 gig economy services can be classified as bounty boards. The internet has a thriving peer-to-peer economy of bounties.
These are great products. They're just not revolutionary. They're Blogger. A useful, early application of what digital value networks make possible for coordinating action online. But they don't fully explore the advantages of frictionless distribution that come from breaking coordination down to its atomic form.
Bounties are static. They require a single person or a single organization to manage. They can't respond in a flexible manner to a rapidly changing environment or the desire for other people to support them.
They aren't social.
And this matters because this lack of a social dynamic limits them as a pricing mechanism. Which also limits them as a reliable source of information.
[P]rices can act to coördinate the separate actions of different people in the same way as subjective values help the individual to coördinate the parts of his plan... We must look at the price system as such a mechanism for communicating information if we want to understand its real function
Hayek, 1945 - quoted by @elidourado
The breakthrough of social media posts and feeds was that they allowed us to spontaneously price what mattered to us thanks to permissionless access. Likes, comments, and reposts were all tiny value signals unleashed by the internet's information distribution architecture. Those signals, in turn, have helped us to better understand the world around us and what other people care about.
What we need to do is take that lesson and apply it to bounties. And that's what we're doing with @poidhxyz
Our core product makes creating a bounty as easy as making a post on any social media platform. We give you a form with three fields:
Title
Description
Amount
Once your bounty is created, it generates a single URL that can be shared with anyone. Importantly, that URL on the poidh.xyz site is not the only access point, and we do not control your funds. Your bounty is only controlled by your wallet, and it lives on a fully onchain, immutable smart contract.
All of that is fairly standard bounty board behavior. But what comes next is what sets us apart.
Once a bounty is created, anyone can add funds to your bounty. If someone vibes with your idea, they can double it, triple it, 10x it. There's no upper limit, and up to 150 individual wallets can participate.
This makes bounties social objects, capable of going viral in the same way a normal social post can go viral. The only difference is that the virality comes from skin in the game, not a like or a repost.
These outcomes are not hypothetical. We've seen them happen live with @jessepollak adding .25 ETH to what started as a $25 bounty.
onboard a friend to @baseapp, record it, and get a shot at the grand prize
shoutout @sepehrshams13 for starting this initiative! we can't wait to see these videos
Onboarding to base app
- record a 1 minute+ video of yourself onboarding a friend to the Base app (make sure you say "this is for poidh" at the beginning of the video) - make sure we can see your friends new Base app...
And, most memorably, with our $100 Guinness World Record bounty for kickflips in 1 minute that snowballed to $30,000 (and the record).
Our mission with poidh is to make bounties social and to give online human coordination the benefits of free market price discovery. In the same way Uniswap set the gold standard as a swapping protocol, we want to set the gold standard as a coordination protocol.
And, just like Uniswap, our markets are permissionless.
Bounties are never controlled by a single wallet. Contributors can withdraw their contribution if they lose faith in a bounty creator to select an appropriate winner. They also have the ability to veto a bounty creator's selection if they do not agree with the decision. Bounties revert to their original state if >50% of participating voters choose to veto during a 48-hour confirmation period. If you want to learn more, you can find the full mechanism design here.
Past onchain bounty protocols like Bounties Network and Gitcoin did have similar crowdfunding and verification features. But they were controlled centrally by bounty creators and required manual setup and configuration. This friction is what we've removed with our automated, standardized system of crowdfunding and governance.
We also have a key distinction that those other platforms overlooked. The site's architecture is not that of a bounty board. It's that of a social media site with a feed page, subreddit-style "album" pages to build communities, and profile pages that let users showcase their history.
Instead of flexing what they post, they flex what they've helped accomplish IRL.
We'll continue adding to these social features. In the future, poidh users will be able to connect and verify a wide variety of social accounts on their profiles. Albums will eventually have feature-parity with Reddit subreddits and Discord servers, allowing for moderators to tailor the app to their specific needs. And we'll add AI features that allow anyone to quickly and transparently query our rich, fully onchain social graph of who paid who for what.
So, have we formulated the perfect end state of online bounties? It's way too early for us to say that. But, for now, I think it's safe to say we have a spark.
Bounties are the internet's best potential tool for unlocking a massive new wave of experimental human coordination, and our goal is to be the protocol that paves the way.
With no bureaucracy, little to lose, and a passion to prove themselves, small teams consistently outperform larger organizations when it comes to innovation. Incentive prizes are perfectly designed to harness this energy.
Let's coordinate the future by thinking smaller.
poidh.xyz is the most popular frontend for the poidh bounty protocol, but we're not the only one. You can also use the Gnars bounty board, and we're dedicated to making it easy for anyone to spin up alternate frontends in the future. Stay tuned to docs.poidh.xyz for updates that will make the process seamless.
We are also a proudly open source project. Both with our app and our smart contracts. We invite you to take them, reuse them, remix them, whatever. Our system for crowdfunding and verifying outcomes is meant to be a public good.
The mission for poidh.xyz is to be the very best frontend on the internet for interacting with the protocol. But we still want to support everyone else who has their own specific use cases and ideas for how to make it better.
Finally, for the latest updates on what we're doing, you can follow @poidhxyz and subscribe to our blog.
We are currently fundraising so I can go full-time, hire a dev team, and scale the protocol. If you're interested, my DMs are open, or you can reach me on TG via the same handle (@kennyistyping).